Publications
Publications
Show Results For
- All HBS Web
(10,916)
- Faculty Publications (1,696)
- December 2024
- Article
Managerial Pluralism: Thirty Years of Teaching Business Ethics
The author reflects on 30 years of teaching business ethics at Harvard Business School. The paper presents tactical lessons for teaching courses in professional ethics and introduces “managerial pluralism.” This concept is akin to Isaiah Berlin’s value pluralism and... View Details
- November 2024 (Revised January 2025)
- Case
Precision Agriculture at AGCO
By: Rajiv Lal, Alicia Dadlani and Ai-Ling Jamila Malone
In 2024, AGCO, a leading agricultural equipment manufacturer, sought to improve its customers net farm income by 20% over five years by becoming a comprehensive one-stop precision agriculture solutions provider and strengthening its dual channel sales approach—retrofit... View Details
- November 2024 (Revised May 2025)
- Case
Indonesia Education Reform: Merdeka Belajar ('Emancipated Learning')
By: John Jong-Hyun Kim, Adina Wong, Nancy Hua Dai and Mary C. Sauer
This case is set in 2024 in Indonesia, as Nadiem Makarim, Minister of Education, Culture, Research, and Technology, reflects on his tenure as Minister shortly before stepping down. With the ambition to lift Indonesia out of the middle-income gap by raising K12 to... View Details
- November 5, 2024
- Article
The International Empirics of Management
By: Daniela Scur, Scott Ohlmacher, John Van Reenen, Morten Bennedsen, Nick Bloom, Ali Choudhary, Lucia Foster, Jesse Groenewegen, Arti Grover, Sjoerd Hardeman, Leonardo Iacovone, Ryo Kambayashi, Marie-Christine Laible, Renata Lemos, Hongbin Li, Andrea Linarello, Mika Maliranta, Denis Medvedev, Charlotte Meng, John Miles Touya, Natalia Mandirola, Roope Ohlsbom, Atsushi Ohyama, Megha Patnaik, Mariana Pereira-López, Raffaella Sadun, Tatsuro Senga, Franklin Qian and Florian Zimmermann
A country’s national income broadly depends on the quantity and quality of workers and capital. But how well these factors are managed within and between firms may be a key determinant of a country’s productivity and its GDP. Although social scientists have long... View Details
- September 26, 2024
- Article
A Better Way to Measure Social Impact
By: Robert S. Kaplan and Constance Spitzer
All impact investors report the financial returns from their funds and investments, and many provide metrics on intended social outcomes, such as numbers of individuals served, or quality jobs created. But investors do not supply metrics about their impacts on... View Details
- September 2024
- Exercise
Finding Your 'Jagged Frontier': A Generative AI Exercise
By: Mitchell Weiss
In 2023 a set of scholars set out to study the effect of artificial intelligence (AI) on the quality and productivity of knowledge workers—in this specific instance, management consultants. They wanted to know across a range of tasks in a workflow, which, if any, would... View Details
- September 2024
- Case
InfraCredit and the Project Inception Facility
By: John Macomber, Namrata Arora and Maagatha Kalavadakken
Around the world, large infrastructure projects are frequently stymied by the high cost and high uncertainty of the project inception phase: the research and engineering and planning prior to financial close and start of construction. Could there be a new kind of... View Details
Keywords: Infrastructure; Financial Institutions; Financial Instruments; Cost; Cash Flow; Capital; Assets; Financial Markets; Financial Strategy; Insurance; Energy; Product Development; Risk and Uncertainty; Business Strategy; Credit; Financial Services Industry; Energy Industry; Banking Industry; Africa; Nigeria
- September 2024
- Case
Topaz: Navigating Governance, Legacy, and Change
By: Christina R. Wing and Carla Larangeira
Since its founding in 2011, the Garza Sada brothers and their father positioned Topaz among leading family offices in Monterrey, Mexico, with several assets under management. Topaz aspired to have a transformative impact across multiple Mexican industries. An industry... View Details
Keywords: Business Conglomerates; Family Business; Governing and Advisory Boards; Managerial Roles; Management Succession; Family Ownership; Corporate Governance; Organizational Structure; Adoption; Education Industry; Education Industry; Education Industry; Education Industry; Latin America; Mexico
- 2024
- Working Paper
Does Private Equity Have Any Business Being in the Health Care Business?
By: Nori Gerardo Lietz and Zirui Song
Private Equity (“PE”) has come under increased scrutiny by the press, academics, and policymakers, as well as the public, for its investments in health care delivery. This scrutiny has been exacerbated by recent high profile hospital bankruptcies following PE... View Details
- September 2024
- Article
Investing in the Next Generation: The Long-Run Impacts of a Liquidity Shock
By: Patrick Agte, Arielle Bernhardt, Erica M. Field, Rohini Pande and Natalia Rigol
How do poor entrepreneurs trade off investments in business enterprises versus children's human capital, and how do these choices influence intergenerational socio-economic mobility? To examine this, we exploit experimental variation in household income resulting from... View Details
- 2024
- Working Paper
The New Digital Divide
By: Mayana Pereira, Shane Greenstein, Raffaella Sadun, Prasanna Tambe, Lucia Ronchi Darre, Tammy Glazer, Allen Kim, Rahul Dodhia and Juan Lavista Ferres
We build and analyze new metrics of digital usage that leverage telemetry data collected by Microsoft during operating system updates across forty million Windows devices in U.S. households. These measures of US household digital usage are much more comprehensive than... View Details
- 2024
- Working Paper
The Operational Impact of Customer Location in On-Demand Services
By: Natalie Epstein, Santiago Gallino and Antonio Moreno
The rapid growth of on-demand delivery services, particularly in the food and grocery sectors, has driven the expansion of hyperlocal fulfillment centers (FCs). This paper uses data from an on-demand grocery delivery platform in Latin America to assess how customer... View Details
- August 2024
- Case
Ashesi University: The Journey from Vision to Reality
By: Ranjay Gulati and Caroline de Lacvivier
In 1997, Patrick Awuah had a dream: to bring liberal arts education to Ghana. Amid the country’s declining economy and pervasive corruption problems, Awuah saw education as an opportunity to reverse its fortunes by investing in the next generation of African leaders.... View Details
- August 2024
- Case
Pioneering Pain Management: CWC Alliance Combats the Opioid Epidemic
By: Susanna Gallani, Karen L. Sedatole and Sarah Mehta
Set in March 2024, this case is about CWC Alliance (CWC), a nonprofit working to prevent opioid addiction in the U.S. Founder Cammie Wolf Rice launched CWC in 2018 after her son, Christopher Wolf, died of a heroin overdose. Wolf’s dependence on opioids stemmed from a... View Details
- August 19, 2024
- Article
The Business Roundtable’s Stakeholder Pledge, Five Years Later
By: Lynn S. Paine
Five years ago, the Business Roundtable issued a statement pledging to “lead their companies for the benefit of all stakeholders.” In the past five years, stakeholderism has gained wider acceptance and helped many corporate leaders see the value of taking the interests... View Details
- 2025
- Working Paper
Narrative AI and the Human-AI Oversight Paradox in Evaluating Early-Stage Innovations
By: Jacqueline N. Lane, Léonard Boussioux, Charles Ayoubi, Ying Hao Chen, Camila Lin, Rebecca Spens, Pooja Wagh and Pei-Hsin Wang
Do AI-generated narrative explanations enhance human oversight or diminish it? We investigate this question through a field experiment with 228 evaluators screening 48 early-stage innovations under three conditions: human-only, black-box AI recommendations without... View Details
- 2024
- Article
Crucibles, Multiple Sensitive Periods, and Career Progression
By: Prithwiraj Choudhury, Sunasir Dutta, Hise O. Gibson and Eric Lin
We study the effects of crucible experiences along multiple sensitive periods on career progression. While prior literature has hinted that individuals can be imprinted during multiple sensitive periods, not just during the early career, there has been scant attention... View Details
- August 2024
- Article
Heuristics on Call: The Impact of Mobile-Phone-Based Business-Management Advice
By: Shawn Cole, Mukta Joshi and Antoinette Schoar
There is growing evidence that business training for micro-entrepreneurs can be effective. However, in-person training can be expensive and imposes costs on the target beneficiaries. This paper presents the results of a two-site randomized evaluation of a light-touch,... View Details
- July 2024
- Case
ZEISS: Commercializing Science
By: Maria P. Roche, Carlota Moniz and Daniela Beyersdorfer
Karl Lamprecht, President and CEO of the ZEISS AG Group, mused on how far ZEISS had come in 175 years of being a pioneer in optics, and how the course he had charted since taking the helm of the company could keep it on track. In his role, he oversaw the four core... View Details
Keywords: Business Model; Business Organization; Decisions; Business Strategy; Competition; Business History; Collaborative Innovation and Invention; Independent Innovation and Invention; Disruptive Innovation; Innovation and Management; Innovation Strategy; Technological Innovation; Growth and Development Strategy; Knowledge Sharing; Industry Growth; Monopoly; Organizational Culture; Supply Chain Management; Partners and Partnerships; Risk and Uncertainty; Adaptation; Commercialization; Resource Allocation; Corporate Strategy; Semiconductor Industry; Technology Industry; Germany; Europe
- July 2024
- Case
Freelancer, Ltd.
By: Christopher Stanton, Karim R. Lakhani, Jin Hyun Paik and Nina Cohodes
Over the course of the 2010s, the rapid advancement of mobile technologies and the rise of online freelancing platforms seemed to portend a radical transformation of labor markets into on-demand, flexible talent pools. Even though several Fortune 500... View Details